Page 63 of Hero's Prize

“Nothing. It’s silly.”

“Tell me.”

She shrugged. “You bring your lady friends here. I don’t blame you. This is a great place.”

He pulled her against his chest and wrapped his arms around her. “You’re the only woman—the only person atall—I’ve ever brought here. This is my haven I come to when I want to get away from everything else and think.”

She rested her head against his chest and sighed. “Even if you had brought women here, it would be okay.”

“I know the press—and hell, Tony and the rest of my public relations team—try to make me out to be some sort of player or ladies’ man, but that’s not how I am.”

“It’s okay. Someone of your popularity is bound to have a lot of?—”

He shook his head, cutting her off. “They want to make it seem like I’m with a different woman every night because it perpetuates theadventurous herostereotype—” he made exaggerated air quotes with his fingers “—but I have no interest in that. For a while, it was fun, but it hasn’t been that way for a long time.”

She felt bad that she was making him defend himself. “Colton?—”

He pulled back so that they could look each other in the eye. “I haven’t been with anybody since you at the wedding. And evenbefore then, it’d been months. I don’t want you to get the idea that I think of women as disposable. And I very definitely don’t think of you that way.”

With those chocolate-colored eyes locked with hers, it was impossible to doubt the sincerity of his words. She reached up and cupped his hard jaw with her hands. “Thank you for bringing me here. Now, let’s get into that hot spring.”

He smiled and the tension was broken.

Once their clothes were off, they didn’t make it into the steamy water right away, and even once they did make it in, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Not that Ella was complaining at all.

Colton sat with his head leaning back against the edge of the spring, eyes closed. Ella was on the other end, also lying back, loving the feel of their legs entwined and how he gently rubbed his foot up and down her calf, as if he couldn’t stand the thought of not touching her, despite the two rounds of lovemaking they’d just had.

“This is the best cabin ever,” he muttered. “I suspected that was true before today, but today cemented it for me.”

“I wish we could stay here and let all our problems figure themselves out back home. Speaking of, how did the sting operation go?”

He explained what had happened and that they hadn’t had any luck.

She immediately knew the issue. “Well, the problem was that you were sitting there alone.”

He shrugged. “We were trying to make me seem approachable in case the stalker got the nerve to come up and talk to me.”

Ella sat up a little straighter in the water. She wasn’t law enforcement or any sort of profiler, but she did know what it was like to be someone who couldn’t get Colton Harrison out of her mind.

“I’m not sure that approaching you is her endgame, despite the letters.”

“What do you mean?” His eyes popped open.

“I feel like everything she’s doing may be more to feed the fantasy in her mind than it is to actually meet you.”

He stopped rubbing her leg with his foot. “Honestly, that was my thinking too, until recently, when all this took a turn for the more crazy. I might not have ever really pursued catching her at all if it weren’t for that. The knife through the pictures and the talk about being together forever.”

“If you want to catch her taking a picture of you, I think you’re going to have to be doing more normal stuff. Sitting alone at a bar isn’t normal for you.”

“Normal, like going on a date?”

Ella nodded. “Sure. As a matter of fact, that might get her jealous enough to force her into action. Maybe you have a lady friend that you can call up and ask to help you out?”

The thought gutted her, but if it got the stalker out in the open, then that was the only thing that mattered. Plus, it wasn’t like she and Colton had any sort of commitment to each other.

“A lady friend I can call up?” He cocked his eyebrow nearly to his hairline.

“Yeah, you know, like an ex-girlfriend or someone.”

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